It was just over two decades ago that seminal rap group Salt-N-Pepa helped usher a discussion of HIV and AIDS awareness into the hip-hop community with their single "Let's Talk About Sex" and its reworking "Let's Talk About AIDS." Continuing that tradition of outreach, last weekend Pepa was on-hand for the launch of interactive art installation and social media HIV/AIDS awareness campaign The Arches of Hope. Along with an installation outside the lobby of urban resort The Out NYC, the Lifebeat: Music Fights AIDS and MTV Staying Alive organized campaign encourages a wide-scale sending of messages of hope with the hashtag #ArchesOfHope which will be beamed to jumbo screen in Times Square and shared across a dozen social media sites. We spoke to Pepa about her longtime involvement with raising HIV and AIDS awareness, as well as being on-hand for Arches of Hope's launch.

The year in music, circa 2010, started at the Cake Shop, with a shred-down to the New Year courtesy of Siren Festival MVP-to-be Marissa Paternoster and her band Screaming Females. After a tour through the NYE fetes of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, that night ended amidst a marathon show at Bushwick's Shea Stadium, right around the time the Blastoids' drummer poured paint on his kit and started splattering away.

Stephen Malkmus, at the first of Pavement's 50 shows here. Pics by Rob unless noted otherwise.

The 100-plus shows I saw this year spanned from the Cake Shop to Radio City Music Hall, from Williamsburg block parties to Michael Bolton's house in Connecticut, the events that occurred therein all furtively documented on an iPhone notepad and sometimes captured via relentlessly amateurish photography. The best were a mix of usual suspects and total surprises, current hitmakers and reconstructed old-timers, all hitting whatever stage with some combination of joy, ferocity, indifference, disdain, and messianic grandeur. Here are the 10 that made my imminent hearing loss seem nonetheless somehow totally worth it.